AN OFFERING OF UNCLES

KIRKUS REVIEW

Father Capon's first book, Bed and Board, was the rarest thing in religious publishing: a Catholic best-seller by a Protestant clergyman. The author's affiliation (Episcopal) was far less important than his happy combination of wit, whimsey, and wisdom. In the present work, Capon demonstrates that his talent has grown with time; his series of reflections on ""the priesthood of Adam and the shape of the world"" will inevitably be ranked above Bed and Board. In Capon's hands, a simple thing -- a marsh reed, for example -- becomes an intriguing allegory of life; a car, the Kafkaesque symbol of man's entrapment in a non-existent dimension; a village, a microcosm. But he never allows the reader to forget that it is not the reed, the automobile, the village, or even man alone that is important; it is man with the reed, the car, the village, in relation to a creating-sustaining God. The book, then, is not Catholic, or Protestant, or liberal or fundamentalist or traditionalist. Like Capon's message, it is, first of all, human; and then it is Christian. The success of Bed and Board should be merely an indication of what can be expected of An Offering of Uncles.

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